Archery hunting, something to thnk about

Just a little something to think about, we have the best archery equipment that money can buy these days when we hunt but yet it is still very difficult to harvest our game. With that being said, how skilled (or lucky) do you think the Indians had to be 150 years ago to even harvest any game with the crude weapons that they had. No doubt they had to be very skilled at their craft in order to just survive from their kills. If they had had the archery gear that we have now, the Indians would still control this country. Lol. No doubt the game has gotten much smarter and their survivor skills are far greater than yester years and with the explosion of people into their habitat. I was sitting in my ladder blind, bow in hand when I started to think about this and it made me feel very lucky to have the knowledge, skill and high priced gear to get it done and still sometimes that is a tall order.

They didn’t have same issues, because they where hungry and much more driven to success. Also they had no game laws or legal restrictions

We are fat and happy... figuratively speaking of course

Reading Dr. Saxton Pope’s writings about the Native American Ishi is very entertaining and enlightening on this very subject.

Their skills were beyond description (much like the African trackers most are more familiar with). Plus, hunting was their life. It was a deadly combination.

When you started something as early in life as they did you learn a lot more than now. They may not have had the equipment but they had the knowledge.

Yes sir, that is a great read and amazing history, kind of sad in some respects, but Ishi wasn't all thrilled on going back to live in his old ways on a permanent basis. Just glad some of his lie was documented. BTW, he was an amazing arrowhead craftsman.

Yep, it is amazing how skilled you can get when your life is literally on the line.

And as BOBO pointed out, they had no qualms with banding up and driving them into a river to be shot while swimming or over a cliff. Dead was dead to them and they really didn't care how it happened.

I found this buck on my place this evening. I figure someone with all the high tech equipment made a great archery story about a lost buck. He was close to Proffitt cemetery if anyone wants to claim him.

They were skinny for a reason, lol except when they had their Buffalo jumps and ran them off of cliffs.

Second highest nature mortality rates in bucks is between shedding velvet and pre-rut. Hard to speculate but good deer non the less. Shame

If you practiced with a simple long bow every single day for your entire life, you'd be pretty good with it too.

When there are no grocery stores and you have to spend 365 days a year in survival mode AND there are no laws limiting what you can do - yeah, if you were alive you would probably be a pretty deadly hunter. Along with being a expert gatherer / scavenger. Different kind of life, one that close to zero percent of people today would survive in.

If the government collapsed, the power went out, the trucks stopped delivering food to grocery stores and the water stopped flowing to homes .... half the population would be dead in less than a month and other half of the population would be close to it. Those kind of survival skills don't exist in the population anymore.

You guys watch Alone? Where they drop 10 people in some remote place and the last person to leave wins 500k? Even in the last season, the guy who was a good hunter - snagged a moose, wolverine, etc (bow hunting)... guy had plenty of MEAT but was still losing 1lb a DAY because you need more than just meat to survive (he almost got a forced medical tap because he lost so much weight - several other contestants were forced to leave on a medical tap). Your body needs other nutrition to function properly and process the food you're eating... something most people don't even realize.

Yeah, different kind of life and definitely survival skills that people don't have today. Those were hard people, we're all a bunch of pansies in comparison.

I don't believe the Indians where as good as hunters as they were portrayed.

I believe most walked around in various states of starvation majority of the time until they got horses. Most were hunter/gatherers, and most scavenged, caught small animals and forgaged what they could. I think its a common misconception that Indians were master hunters that were almost god-like in the woods. Their bows were crude and i'm sure they wounded a lot of game. But a lot of types of game to be had so they made do.

Also, all they did was Sleep, breed, make war and hunt for food. A lot of tribes also ate horses after the Spanish came. so a big part of their day was just looking for food or preparing it.


Not to say they didn't have superior instincts that modern man certainly did not possess but it was a hard existence to eek out.

I think you might be surprised how good a hunters most Native Americans were. Especially in the nomadic tribes.

Yes they struggled, yes many died, yes they gathered, yes they killed by any means - but they were a helluva lot more than wastrels wandering the earth eking out a fringe existence. They crossed the Bering Land bridge and populated the entirety of North and South America in the span of a few thousand years.

That didn’t happen by luck or by marginal survivors.

I think there were also more available food sources to be had than we are accustomed to now.


its interesting to speculate on how things actually were. I tend to take written history with a grain of salt, as most of it has been glamorized or mis-construed in many ways. Look at our boy Chris Columbus for instance. We were always taught he discovered America. Now its commonly taught that he discovered Haiti and was a slave trader and otherwise awful person.

The guide from my last few buffalo hunts occasionally guides someone with the stones to take one with a bow. People going up against an old bull on foot with a bow, to me that has to be about as close as a person can get today to feeling what the original inhabitants of this land felt when they did the same. If you don't land the few shots it's going to take well, or if the wind turns on you, there's not a lot you can do against an animal that runs 35mph and hopes you'll retreat to the truck bed so he can hop up in there with you.

Most of my reading on the subject is not schoolbook stuff - it’s the best that can be gleaned from dedicated authors
who are also hard researchers.

As just one example, the Comanches ruled the Southwest until after the Civil War (with some brief exceptions when the Rangers were active). The skill with which they wielded their bows/arrows almost defies belief but is well and consistently documented by many first person accounts.

The same can be said of many tribes (Kiowa, Apache, Karankawa, Sioux, Crow, Iroquois, etc., etc...).

There were definitely lesser tribes who relied more on scavenging, gathering, and agriculture - but my guess is even their hunting skills were probably nothing to sneer at.

Originally Posted by Nogalus Prairie

Most of my reading on the subject is not schoolbook stuff - it’s the best that can be gleaned from dedicated authors
who are also hard researchers.

As just one example, the Comanches ruled the Southwest until after the Civil War (with some brief exceptions when the Rangers were active). The skill with which they wielded their bows/arrows almost defies belief but is well and consistently documented by many first person accounts.

The same can be said of many tribes (Kiowa, Apache, Karankawa, Sioux, Crow, Iroquois, etc., etc...).

There were definitely lesser tribes who relied more on scavenging, gathering, and agriculture - but my guess is even their hunting skills were probably nothing to sneer at.

Hey now, don't come in here talking about what you learned from books.

I watched Last of the Mohicans, Jeremiah Johnson, Dances with Wolves and the Lone Ranger - I'm an expert on Indians I tell you! LOL

But seriously - we'll never really know how good of hunters they were and can only rely on what is written (which may not be trustworthy, as pointed out) and our imaginations. Given the level of technology at the time, I tend to believe they were hard people that led hard lives and were probably far better hunters than people today - they would have to be to survive. Trapping was probably easier for them, so they likely did a lot of that. But hunting was part of their survival as well and given what tools were available - they HAD to possess pretty extreme hunting skills to be successful and make hunting worthwhile. Without some pretty extreme hunting skills to ensure successful hunts, hunting just wouldn't have been a worthwhile task for them and they wouldn't hunt at all. Survival was a 365 day a year job back then - people had to pick and choose what labors were worthwhile and going to lead to not dying a while longer.

I suspect they were as skilled at hunting as we are at driving.

Then there were a ton of totally useless unskilled hunters in their ranks LOL

I know in many areas they were also not solitary hunters. Often times they were in decent size groups and hunted much the same way as you would with dogs but instead used people. Select an area were the topography allowed a bunch of people to push the game into natural funnels and than have a designated kill zone where another group would hammer on the game with spears and bows. In fact this technique is still used today for whitetail in the far north end of their range. It is a tradition that carried over from the natives into our hunting regs and is permitted as "party hunting" where everyone in your group is licensed and has at least one tag. It used in the dense north woods except instead of human pushers most groups use hounds to push the deer into natural pinch point kill zones. This is often the only way to get any deer in many of these areas as the deer density is on the low end due to the habitat and climate and most places you can't see more than 10 or 15 yards.

Where my parents live in Alberta is not too far from a UNESCO world heritage site called "Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump." The natives would locate a herd of buffalo and than drive/stampede them off of a cliff. No real weapons used except for the butchering taking place at the base of the cliff. They could literally kill 1000s at a time. They would take everything they needed for themselves and use the extra to trade with other tribes.

In the far north woods the natives were dependent on the Caribou migration which at the high points in the cycle rivaled the wildebeest migration in Africa for numbers. Once again they would set up at a natural pinch point during the annual migration and could kill enough in 1 or 2 weeks to survive the entire winter. Certainly wasn't always easy though as if they missed the migration due to timing/location or if the Caribou were in a natural low cycle it would be a God awful winter with misery to spare.

If you want a true and accurate account of life back then, you need to put down the modern books, mainly anything written after the early to mid 1900's.
Most books showing the history and accounts of life back then on the frontier were first hand from folks that actually survived those times.
You will understand why the early settlers called a full moon a "Comanche Moon!"

Yes the only thing killing deers is arrows.

Why would the Eastern Woodland tribes be lesser? The Eastern Woodland Indians survived by hunting, farming and trading. We were much more advanced than the Plains Indians you seem to be so infatuated with. Read some of the missionary accounts of the Choctaws, Chickasaws and Cherokees and you many think differently. Better yet, visit some of the Nations next time you go to the Tulsa gun show. We can show you a thing or two.

I grew up in Western Arkansas/Eastern Oklahoma. Many of my hunting and fishing buddies were Cherokee or Choctaw. Don't know if it was inherited skills or what, but every one of those guys was/is a superb outdoorsman. I learned a lot from them.

I bet they didn't single out and wait for a mature buck lol.

No doubt I think they were probably good at what they did, but I could also see researchers that are mesmerized with their culture etc. which is who I would assume does most of the research, exaggerating and we all know that first hand accounts are exaggerated from time to time.

Chill out. It wasn’t represented as an exhaustive list - (notice the etc., etc.....?). I even said that the hunting skills of even the agricultural tribes was nothing to sneer at. (Plus, last I looked the Iroquois were an eastern woodlands tribe.)

My whole point in this thread is defending/highlighting the hunting prowess of Native Americans in the face of those who would basically paint them as hand-to-mouth scavengers, yet I’m the one you want to take issue with? OK....

I do know that Indians gave up on the bows when they got ahold of Sharps and Winchester’s....

I would be interested to know how good of woodsman they were pre-European influence.

Must have been a tough, tough life

they were not near as buffalo dependent or efficient, that’s for sure. Introduction of the horse drastically changed the land scape. With out the horse they where more like bears extremely good at optimization of give freebies...

You take game laws out of the equation and playing field gets a lot less even for animals.

This was my whole point when I posted up, was just how tough it must have been and how skilled they had to be to survive. I was a cultural way of life that was exactly that, life or death. If this country ever goes back to the days of hunter/gatherers, most of population will perish after a short time.

The Comanche, which were expert horseman, were very pretty much opportunistic feeders prior to the introduction of the horse according to the experts on the subject. if you have absolutely nothing to do all day, but look for food in pre-European North America, I think it would range from pretty easy to get a belly full of food to pretty dismal depending on the season.

I also think prior to horseback they didn't eat near the amount of big game as we think and sustained themselves on a lot of small game, birds, fish and reptiles.

it would be interesting for sure.

I for one would head west. Forget hunting deer i'm knocking off as many meat goats and calves as I can. Deer and pigs would be a last resort

There is a cave in Europe in which anthropologists have found the remains of over 20,000 fallow deer. 20,000.

The ancients were not just dumpster divers.

And they didn’t “Give up on the bows when they got ahold of Sharps and Winchesters.” Guns (and moreso ammunition) were hard to come by even in the latter days just before their extirpation. Bows/arrows were still used extensively as late as in the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876 - even though they also used firearms to great effect in the battle. Many Comanches never opted for firearms - and eyewitness accounts provide a testament to their effectiveness with a bow. Did the Native Americans use firearms? Yes. Sometimes extensively when they could gather them and ammunition in quantity. But it’s an oversimplified myth that they substituted them for their primitive weapons en masse at any point, because that’s not what happened. Their primitive weapons were used extensively to the end.

See Ishi as Exhibit 1.

The grizzly, the eagle, the coyote (and many other animals) will take advantage of any food opportunities that come their way, even carrion - because they are survivors.

That doesn’t mean they aren’t still wonderfully skilled hunters of the first order. It’s not a binary proposition.

The mountain lion is an extremely good hunter, the wolf is also I highly skilled and thought out pack hunting animal.

The Bear is a seasonal calf killer, that’s spends more time scavenging just like the yote,

Lol it’s a wonder them dang Native Americans and bears survived before us white people came along with our Winchesters and cattle to help them out.

Did we teach them how to hunt too?

Having spent a lot of time around fallow deer....I can certainly believe that!

Very wary critters here for sure!

2 authors, Eve Ball and CL Sonnichsen, these 2 wrote about the Apache Indians. Eve Ball was a hands on interviewer of some of the Mescalero Elders. CL Sonnichsen, was more pf an academic author, since he was part of teh faculty at El Paso School of Mines, now UTEP. Both had quite a bit of word of mouth history of the Apache, If you have read the history of the Comanches, you will find a similarity of the them and the Apache and their "Gods" of the North. The same info will als surface if studying the other tribes, from the all over the country.

Did the Indians migrate through the Bering Straits? Too much similarities in the old stories of the Great North, Some believe they came over the North Pole during a warming period, eons ago. All tribes probably came near the same time frame, maybe as one tribe.

Eve Ball was a school teacher,, that moved to New Mexico to teach, then retired to Ruidoso, her life is a story in itself. She wrote a lot of books, they are easy reading and readily available on the used book market. A WWII widow and has an interesting Wiki page Sonnichsen, from Iowa that taught English at UTEP, a sort of "dry" read, but has backup to his sources that is sometimes cited in his books.

My partner had a great grandfather that met his end at a mission south of San Antonio by an arrow fired from a Indian, can’t remember if it was an Apache or a Comanche.


I am not saying that Indians were bumbling fools that lived day to day by the string of their moccasins. I’m just saying I’m of the opinions that life wasn’t all peaches and cream and they had struggles hunting game just like anyone else would have.

No denying that they had skill sets Europeans did not and would not ever have.

Take a look at some of the uncontacted tribes in the Amazon , that should give a person a pretty good idea.


I’ve also read that plains Indians ( don’t know about the eastern tribes) were quite a bit taller than the European settlers. It was not uncommon to find 6’ Indians when your avg. European was 5’5-5’7

Can y’all just imagine if Indians had suppressed Tikka 6.5 creedmoors?

It’s very interesting to me the very different paths to “civilization” that took place on the various continents. Especially the contrasts of the others compared to Europe/Middle East/Asia Minor.

Yes, it’s very interesting.

How we could have the Roman and Ottoman Empire on one side of the world and pretty much Stone Age nomads on the other

Reason #1 why the North American Genocide wasn't a more difficult or time-consuming venture for our European ancestors. The first people Columbus met cut themselves on Spanish swords, having absolutely no understanding of what they were.

By the time they figured out that "manifest destiny" meant "state-sponsored genocide" it was too late.

Don't forget that many Indians were cannibalistic, food any way they could get it. Don't see much of that in history books.

My FIL have had this conversation...

I married a all natural, hippie wanna be, eat healthy, excericse gal

So...

Two years running, I’ve tried (her, not me) an all natural garden

Lemme tell ya, it ain’t much.

I’ve sprung into action and saved it w Miracle Grow

If they grew any type of garden, idk how they got by

The numbers 1 and 2 reasons we overwhelmed them were:

1)Sheer numbers; and
2)European diseases we brought to which they had no resistance;

It helped that in the years preceding the arrival of Columbus that the majority of the east coast population was wiped out by a plague that historians say had a greater fatality rate than the black plague in Europe. Our European ancestors essentially had lucky timing, arriving during a time when the east coast population was low enough to gain a foothold. At least, that's how I remember it being taught, who knows if it's really true.

That doesn’t mean much. Indigenous people of the Amazon made incredibly fertile soils from nothing without Miracle Grow. Soils nearly ten times as fertile as the most productive soils in the Midwest of America. They just happened to know what they were doing.

Indigenous Americans domesticated the "three sisters" over around 6000 years in Central America, and it spread north and was adapted to local climates to become a core survival technique for virtually everyone. The three sisters are corn, beans, and squash, all planted in a symbiotic plot.

Corn provides a stalk for the beans to climb, beans feed nitrogen to the soil, and squash keeps weeds from popping up. It's nature's Miracle Gro.

Disease was the main undoing of the American Indian.


Also, I’d read a lot of research that it was actually bovine TB that did the buffalo in, not bullets

I doubt you would want to go up against this lone guy, or a bunch of guys like him!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GLk1mMZqDc&t=762s

Accurate information about the hunting of game animals by native Americans is rarely found, you really have to dig deep to find it. Most of the stories we hear or read about has let's just say been glorified.

150 years ago native Americans were already well armed with firearms so let's go back a little farther. Around the 1500's the world changed for native Americans and that change was the introduction of horses. them folks had been on foot for the last 20,000 years. Before horses their methods of hunting and the game they hunted was entirely different. Before horses their world was a world of constant movement in search of protein and fat and they took it any way they could get it. The taking of a large game animal was a rarity and that can be seen in some of their earlier tools. Yes they had heavy weapons such as lances and atlatl's but the bows they carried (I'm talking about the Plains Indians) were short and averaged around a 35 lb pull, they were designed for small game and hardly a weapon for the likes of elk, deer and buffalo. I suspect rocks, short throwing sticks and clubs probably accounted for much of their table fare. Let's look at it this way, you're on foot and having to use a rather inaccurate and anemic bow to take your game, low energy, low velocity and distance. Might explain why so many Jack Rabbit mandibles are found at old camp sites and in some of the leather and straw bags they carried.

The horse was the game changer, giving the ability to travel great distances compared to before, they could stay in one area longer and travel to the game and return instead of constantly following it. While elk and deer could easily escape a man on horseback it wasn't quite so easy for the buffalo and they became the primary target of the Plains. First problem they ran into was their own equipment, more power was needed. The length of the Plains bows were perfect for hunting from horseback and riding into a herd of buffalo but lacked any real penetration, had to able to get that arrow into the vitals. They started backing their bows with sinew and some backed them with horn made from mountain sheep. These bows were much more powerful with some writings claiming they could penetrate both sides of a buffalo. Even with heavier arrows and stronger bows the buffalo was a challenge. An actual organized hunt probably went like this. Ride into the herd and stick as many buffalo as possible, then follow the wounded sticking more arrows in them until they fell. I suspect there was allot of buffalo that were never found.

Through trading with the Spaniards and Europeans they were soon shooting arrows tipped with metal points and that was a game changer giving them better accuracy, durability and speed from their bows. While I have a passion for flint and flint tools it was pretty evident that they abandoned them as soon as possible. That possible came with the introduction of firearms both from Europeans and Spaniards and expanded with early settlements, they moved to firearms leaving the bows behind. Lewis and Clark speak of trading weapons with native Americans. While we see pictures of native Americans from the past and all seem to have bows, by that time they were more for nostalgia and looked good in the pictures.

Love these threads. It’s a shame that there is so much ignorance towards the abilities of our ancestors though, but not surprising.

HWY the only small quibble I have is your statement that “they moved to firearms leaving bows behind.”

First, firearms were a mere blip on the historical timeline of the Native Americans. 95% of them were extirpated by the time firearms came into their world in any significant way. Even as late as the 1850s firearm use was not overly significant by the tribes. The repeating rifle did not come to the West until after the Civil War.

There was only a brief period of any significant use of firearms - and right up to the end the other primitive weapons were used seamlessly right along with them. Those primitive weapons were never abandoned.

Had widespread firearms and ammunition been available to them say, 40 years earlier the casualties on the side of the whites would have been exponentially more - and the conflict may have lasted a lot longer.

ignorance or realistic viewpoints?


I think also we are talking about pre-European Indians here, not Sitting Bull and Quannah Parker era- indians

I believe this to be spot on and are my opinions 100% on the subject.

thanks for making such a well versed post

a bows advantage over the firearms of the era were rapid rate of fire.

Also, ( we are going to use the plains Indians again in this example ) they were far superior as far as horsemanship went and they fought on horseback. if a comanche was riding around you, even with their bows flinging arrows at you, you are effed. if they didh't spear you or jump on top of you and tomahawk you first.



I think we also need to make a definitive line as well for purpose of comparison. Like most civilizations, They had advanced quite a bit as time went on. There was a big difference in a plains Indian in 1500 vs. one in 1860.

We also over romanticize a lot and forget fundamental ecology, food preservation, travel ability etc.

Archeological sites always tend to tell a much different tell them perception.

This thread focuses one talking about the very short 100’sh year time period of firm Europe’s horse influence and not the last 20k years...

So if you want to talk pre-European contract you are talking about a completely different land scape and demographics

Never said they were abandoned just saying they seen less use. While European countries fought over the continent native Americans took advantage and armed themselves through the fur trade. This started a new era with the tribes, many who were battling traditional enemies. Some tribes fought hard to control the gun trade and limit the availability to other tribes. Some tribes had to partner with the Europeans to get the ability to protect themselves against the more well armed enemy. A well armed man on horseback was a formidable opponent. The Comanche were about a fierce as they come, our soldiers attacked small groups in force to eliminate them all. They feared the Comanche and what happens when they gather in numbers, our soldiers usually didn't fare well.

Backed and composite bows really are an overlooked turning point in the era. The lance was paramount in a hunter's arsenal until the first simple backed bows brought real mechanical power to the tool, after which the lance passed out of use relatively quickly.

Wild animal populations were also a lot higher back in the 1800's than we can conceive. I have read old news reports of bear, antelope, deer and buffalo in Runnels county area in the 1870's. Horses and hogs were introduced to Texas by the Spanish explorers in the 1500's, and left to forage by themselves when thye left.

This one from 1876

This one Feb 1880

In the mid 1850s the US Army rode camels out of Camp Verde. In the 1860s, after the Camel Corps were shut down, the government rounded up a few dozen wild camels to keep them from going native. We came this close to having wild camels in Texas.

We had camels up into the Pleistocene.

There are or were camels on a ranch southwest of Wichita Falls about 20 years ago.

Reminds me of the old Indian saying:

“I’d walk a mile for a camel.”

They rounded them up and drove them off a cliff

We hunted south Africa over the summer and the game populations were insane. A lot of people assume it’s artificially inflated but in actuality they are about at what they were pre-European influence there.

If our natural populations were anything like it was over there there was an insane amount of game

Yes sir, outside of Electra. They were raising them and sending them to Chicago to be butchered and consumed by middle easterners.

I wonder if a .223 would make a good camel gun ?

They are mean suckers, one killed 2 people last year in Texas. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/camel-tramples-two-death-texas-farm-n283786

The subject seldom discussed is why some civilizations exceeded others greatly in technological achievement. A desire to build that which is needed to travel great distances seems to have always been at the core of it.

Think that’s the same ranch outside of town that’s had the camel browse line for 20 years.
Wow.

better step it up to a .243 then

its a hell of a lot better topic than talking about Tikka rifles and 6.5 creedmoors all the time.

I never figured the rag heads would eat a camel. I figured they were like horses to us.